Simply Ditching Your Car Saves Money

- Adam Clare

Graph showing average monthly car ownership costs $1370 CAD

Cars are a burden that suck money out of your wallet and dump pollutants onto the streets (yes, even electric cars cause harm). So why dod people use them? Frugal people already know that owning a car equates to a mobile money pit and have looked for more fiscally prudent solutions. If you live a city then you have a multitude of options to get around, those stuck in the suburbs or rural areas are more limited. Still, you can look into car sharing programs and can even reduce the amount you use your car to save money.

The TTC charges $156 for an adult monthly pass. Bike Share Toronto charges $105 plus HST for an annual pass that includes unlimited 30-minute rides. Then there are car-sharing services like Communauto, which offers free monthly membership plans and charges from $13 per hour for a car rental.

If you’re thinking about going car-free, it’s a good idea to tally up exactly how much you spent on owing a car in the past year (including maintenance and repair costs) to see how much you could potentially save and reinvest elsewhere to pay off debts, contribute to an RRSP or reach other financial goals.

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Solar is Powering the Syrian Rebuilding Process

- Adam Clare

Syria has started the rebuilding of infrastructure, culture, communities, and more now that the civil war has concluded. The video above shows how Damascus is rebuilding their trains and other core infrastructure. The most interesting thing in the video is the prevalence of solar panels in the city, seemingly every roof has an installation on it!
The future is renewable and that’s made clear as Syria needs to rebuild quickly and efficiently so they can heal and improve the entire nation.

Tram Driver Championship Goes Global

- Adam Clare

Trams, known in Toronto as streetcars, are a delightful and efficient way to get people around a city. If you’ve ever been a regular rider on a tram network then you know that some drivers are better than others. To celebrate the best tram drivers in the world is the newly global Tram Driver Championship; perviously the competition was only open to European teams. Vienna hosted the competition and introduced the new tram curling competition.

The video above is the official highlight video capturing the highlights and reveals the first ever World Champions.

Successful Treatment for Huntington’s Disease

- Adam Clare

nurses walking in a hallway

Huntington’s disease is a neurological disease that combines dementia and motor neurone issues, making for a very unpleasant experience. Historically, people suffering from Huntington’s disease had low prospects for living their lives as they normally did and a shorter lifespan. A UK team has developed a very interesting solution to treat Huntington’s disease by injecting modified viruses directly into the brain, the really cool thing is that these little viruses then block the ability of Huntington’s disease to spread. It’s a novel and very 21st century approach and good news not only for people who may get Huntington’s but also for related neurological diseases.

It starts with a safe virus that has been altered to contain a specially designed sequence of DNA.

This is infused deep into the brain using real-time MRI scanning to guide a microcatheter to two brain regions – the caudate nucleus and the putamen. This takes 12 to 18 hours of neurosurgery.

The virus then acts like a microscopic postman – delivering the new piece of DNA inside brain cells, where it becomes active.

This turns the neurons into a factory for making the therapy to avert their own death.

The cells produce a small fragment of genetic material (called microRNA) that is designed to intercept and disable the instructions (called messenger RNA) being sent from the cells’ DNA for building mutant huntingtin.

This results in lower levels of mutant huntingtin in the brain.

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When Taxes Go Up, Millionaires Stay Where They Are

- Adam Clare
A table showing countries’ reported migrating millionaires represented less than 1% of their millionaires, and was closer to 0% for most countries, including the UK.
Source: The millionaire exodus myth, Tax Justice Network, June 2025

In 2024 the UK government modified their tax system and as a result lobbyists and millionaires all claimed that increasing taxes would lead to millionaires fleeing the country. This did no happen. In fact, millionaires don’t move all that much. In this context millionaire means a person with over $1 million in liquid assets, which means that people who have an expensive property don’t get counted because their wealth is tied down. With his information in mind we should all be ok with increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy so that their contributions back to society are comparable to the wealth that they extract.

The Tax Justice Network’s review – co-published with Patriotic Millionaires UK and Tax Justice UK – of the Henley report finds that the number of millionaires claimed by Henley & Partners to be leaving countries in “exodus” in 2024 represented near-0% of those countries’ millionaire populations. For example, the 9500 millionaires widely reported to be leaving the UK in 2024 represented 0.3% of the UK’s 3.06 million millionaires.

Media reporting widely blamed the alleged millionaire exodus on tax policies in the same year that calls for a wealth tax on the superrich gained unprecedented momentum globally. The media reporting was equivalent to 30 news pieces a day on the non-existent millionaire exodus across 2024.

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